Events Archives

UTAMA Film Screening

In the arid Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living a tranquil life for years. While he takes their small herd of llamas out to graze, she keeps house and walks for miles with the other local women to fetch precious water. When an uncommonly long drought threatens everything they know, Virginio and Sisa must decide whether to stay and maintain their traditional way of life or admit defeat and move in with family members in the city. Their dilemma is precipitated by the arrival of their grandson Clever, who comes to visit with news. The three of them must face, each in their own way, the effects of a changing environment, the importance of tradition, and the meaning of life itself. This visually jaw-dropping debut feature by photographer-turned-filmmaker Alejandro Loayza Grisi is lensed by award-winning cinematographer Barbara Alvarez (Lucretia Martel’s The Headless Woman) and won the Grand Jury Prize (World Cinema Dramatic) at the Sundance Film Festival.

Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship Q&A Session

Summer and Academic Year (AY) FLAS Fellowships are awarded to undergraduate and graduate students to study less-commonly taught languages, including Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, and Yucatec Maya, in combination with area-studies, international studies or international aspects of professional studies

Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship Info-Session for CNM, NMSU, and Other Minority-Serving Institutions

Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships are awarded to undergraduate and graduate students to study less-commonly taught languages, including Nahuatl, Quechua, Portuguese, and Yucatec Maya. The Summer FLAS Fellowship provides up to $5,000 in tuition and fees and a $2,500 stipend to both undergraduate and graduate students for intensive language training in the U.S. or abroad.

Appreciating Guaraní Words: New Directions in Guaraní Studies

"Sounds Good: A Rhythmic History of Brega" - Screening + Presentation with Creator/Director

Mateus Santos , UNM PhD History Student

Working With Immigrant and Refugee Communities: Training Opportunities and Career Advice

Dr. Jessica Goodkind, Dr Kimberly Gauderman

Learn about training opportunities, valuable skills, and career advice that will prepare you to work effectively with migrant and refugee communities.

Working With Immigrant and Refugee Communities in Albuquerque

Rodrigo Gechem, Fiore Bran Aragon, Dr. Cris Elder

Learn about volunteering opportunities in ABQ that will help you prepare and gain valuable experience to work with migrants from Latin America and other parts of the world.

Latinx Visions: Speculative Worlds in Latinx Art, Literature, and Performance

Latinx artists, writers, and performers are envisioning speculative worlds, including dystopias, utopias, apocalyptic lands, fantastic futures, and horrifying worlds, at a greater rate than ever before. This creative renaissance raises the following questions: Why are Latinx creators drawn to the speculative genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and why now? What is aesthetically exceptional about these new Latinx speculative worlds? With these questions in mind, the Latinx Visions project is gathering, for the first time, some of the most prominent scholars working on this topic for a conference at the University of New Mexico on March 9-11, 2023. The members of the project team, Matthew David Goodwin, Cathryn Merla-Watson, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, have each been guiding the development of this field for over a decade, and are uniquely prepared to bring together the various threads of scholarship from across the Humanities. The conference will be free and open to the public, both virtual and in person. Approximately seventy professors will give presentations at the conference, and we expect that there will be at least a hundred students attending over the course of the conference. Following the conference, the project team will arrange the conference papers into a volume of revised and peer-reviewed chapters. The edited volume, Latinx Visions, is slated to be published in September of 2024 through the Ohio State University Press for their book series “New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality.” In addition to the publication of an edited volume, the conference will result in the creation of a multimedia archive accessible to academics and the larger public that will be housed at the website www.latinxarchive.com. In sum, the Latinx Visions project will forge a vital arena for understanding Latinx speculative worlds, significantly advancing the state of this rapidly growing field.

Land-Based Organizing in Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust, San Juan, Puerto Rico - A Community Control Model for Informal Settlements in Latin America and Beyond

Miles Nowlin

As informal settlements face increasing threats of dispossession, residents, and planners are looking to the Community Land Trust (CLT) model as a tool to promote community control and affordable housing preservation. The Caño Martin Peña Community Land Trust (CMP-CLT) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, was the first CLT designed from within an informal settlement in Latin America and has become a beacon model for similar land-based struggles

Brazilian Writers Speaker Series

Cristiane Sobral

"Sounds Good: A Rhythmic History of Brega" - Screening + Presentation with Creator/Director

Mateus Santos, UNM PhD History Student

Musicology Colloquium: Musical Representation and Advocacy Through Mariachi Consultancies

Lauryn Salazar , Texas Tech University

This presentation explores how Salazar's research on mariachi music has been used in terms of the musical and visual representation of the mariachi tradition through her consultancies with Disney Pixar’s Coco and the 2022 USPS Mariachi Stamps.

1960s Colombia: Cold War & Culture

Dave Corcoran, Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma

PhD Fellows Colloquium

Josue Aciego, Caitlin Ainsworth, Carter Barnwell, Daniel Clayton, Valerio Di Fonzo, Daven Hobbs, Edrea Mendoza, & Jens Van Gysel

Rostros migrantes: Humanizing Migrants’ Voices through Art and Narrative

Derli Romero

Musical Pastiche, Nostalgia, and the Shaping of Latinx Identity in Popular Streaming Media

Jacqueline Avila , University of Texas, Austin

This presentation examines the soundscapes and compositional techniques utilized by the EDM group the Mexican Institute of Sound (MIS) and its founder Camilo Lara in the 2021 album DF and in Netflix’s Latinx-focused dramady Gentefied (2020-21). The music created for both the album and the series feature musics of the past either sampled or referenced into a modern musical pastiche that evokes various forms of nostalgia.

The Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) Movement: Perspectives from the U.S., Spain and Latin America

Dr. Santiago Eizaguirre Anglada, Yvonne Yen Liu, Euclides Mance, & Dr. Eric Griego Montoya

AfroMundo Festival Resistance & Creativity

What Color is my identity?

Dr. Linda García Merchant

Low Frequency Trio's Nueva Músicas Latinoamericanas

José Luis Hurtado, Associate Professor of Music Theory, University of New Mexico; Antonio Rosales, Professor of Bass Clarinet, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Juan José García, Professor, Anáhuac University and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Brazilian Writers Speaker Series, Discussion 3

Natalia Borges Polesso , Brazilian author and journalist

Sons of Mezcal Documentary Screening + Q&A Session

Marsella Macias , LAII Master's Student

Chinese engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean

R. Evan Ellis, PhD

Warriors of Afro-Peruvian Music, AfroMundo Festival 2023

Charo Goyonehe, Rosa Guzmán, Freddy “Huevito” Lobatón, Yuri Juárez

The Hitchcock-Kelly Fund for Human and Indigenous Peoples' Rights

S. James Anaya

Latin American Studies Spring 2023 Convocation

The LAII 2023 convocation will take place on May 12th at 1:30 pm in the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology - Hibben Center Room 105 (auditorium), followed by a reception in the Hibben Atrium. Please contact laii@unm.edu for any questions.

People and Forests of Costa Rica: Writing Political Ecology

Pablo Arias-Benavides , MA Latin American Studies

At this event, Pablo will talk about the relationships between people and the forest in his home country, Costa Rica. Pablo will talk about his fieldwork experience in the summer of 2022 and share what it is like to learn about the place you are from through academic research. As an anthropologist and geographer, Pablo uses interviews, history, political and economic analysis to understand the ways people use, manage, and feel about forests in a rural Southwest region of Costa Rica, Coto Brus.

The Sentimentalization of La Maestra Rural: Race, Gender and Violence in the Taller de Gráfica Popular

Marina M. Álvarez , Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, 2023 Richard E. Greenleaf Library Scholar

This lecture will present a series of images created by various artists of the Taller de Gráfica Popular (T.G.P. – People’s Graphic Workshop) meant to depict post-revolutionary-Mexico’s literacy campaign, and nationalized, rural education. Early artists, upon its founding in 1937 in Mexico City were concerned with education of the masses, and in turn, converted the rural schoolteacher into a visual trope in their portfolios. By nuancing these images, this lecture will analyze how they have articulated and disarticulated nationalism, gender-based violence, and notions of racialization.

Despedidas con Mariachis: Examining COVID-19's Impact on Mexican Americans in Southern California

Jessie M. Vallejo, PhD - Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Cal Poly Pomona

GLORY GONE. An Immersive Opera

Nathan Felix (composer) and local artists

Examining the Human Rights Legacy in Chile

Pascale Bonnefoy, School of Journalism, University of Chile

Chile after Pinochet: The Limits of Post-Dictatorship Transition

Pascale Bonnefoy, School of Journalism, University of Chile

Baracutanga : Latin-inspired group playing free concert at UNM

Spanish & Portuguese Movie Nights

Cine Magnífico - Albuquerque

SOLAS - Latin American Reception

BOOK TALK: Creating Third Spaces of Learning for Post-Capitalism: Lessons from Educators, Artists, and Activists in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Gary L. Anderson and Ana Inés Heras